Fake Hutt doctor Linda Astor releases murderous patient

Fake Hutt doctor Linda Astor releases murderous patient - 150 years of news | Stuff.co.nz

Fake Hutt doctor Linda Astor releases murderous patient - 150 years of news

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Linda Astor after and before her sex change. The Polish-born fraudster was working as a psychiatrist at Hutt Hospital, probably under false credentials, when she freed a violent and suicidal patient who later killed his girlfriend.

A bogus doctor at Hutt Hospital released an insane and violent patient in 1996 who went on to commit a brutal killing.

In the months after Leslie Parr's killing of his girlfriend in Naenae, Lower Hutt, it emerged that the psychiatrist who signed him out was a Polish transsexual fraudster who had fled the country. Linda Astor did not even meet Parr at Hutt Hospital in April 1996 before removing a six-month compulsory treatment order, issued just nine days earlier by a court that decided he was too mentally disturbed to face an assault charge.

A year later, his girlfriend was horrifically slaughtered. "When Fiona Maulolo's two daughters approached their mother's Hutt Valley house on April 18, 1997, they would never have suspected what they would find," The Dominion reported.

A police photograph of Linda Astor at the time of her arrest on shoplifting charges in the United States in October 2001.

"The youngest of the two girls, then 10, entered the Wilkie Cres, Naenae, house to a nightmare – her mother's bloodstained, headless body in the bath. Her head, found by police later that day, was wrapped in a plastic bag in the clothes dryer.

"Maulolo died at the hands of schizophrenic boyfriend Leslie Raymond Parr, who had been released from compulsory psychiatric treatment a year earlier. Six days before the discovery of her body, Parr had repeatedly hammered a chisel into her heart, then severed her head with an axe."

In late 1996, Astor transferred to Nelson-Marlborough Health Services, but never returned from a conference in Paris the following June. The health service fired her as its clinical director of mental health and laid a complaint with police, who found drugs and sex hormones at her home.

Complaints began emerging about Astor's use of shock treatment and drugs at Hutt Hospital. The Medical Council insisted Polish authorities had confirmed her degree, but her work history increasingly appeared to have been fabricated.

"If there is no proof that she qualified as a psychiatrist, then every mental health patient in this country assigned to her care has been damaged," Alliance party leader Jim Anderton told The Evening Post.

Hutt Hospital never would have accepted murderer Parr if it had known his violent and suicidal history:  doctors believed he was subject to a more minor Mental Health Act order, a spokeswoman told the Post.

Staff also blamed an untrained Maori liaison officer for failing to pass on a plea for help from Parr's GP following his release. The liaison officer said the hospital paid him $8000 hush money after the tragedy.

A coroner's report published in 2002 damned the hospital, saying Parr was "radically rediagnosed" there.

The same year, Astor was deported from the United States after being caught shoplifting and having her criminal past discovered. She had been working at a substance abuse hospital and an adolescent welfare agency in New Hampshire and Vermont.

In 2004, a New Zealand television news crew tracked Astor down to a Polish hospital for the mentally insane where she was employed as a senior psychiatrist, after again falsifying her employment history.

"Bogus psychiatrist Linda Astor, whose incompetence led to a brutal psychotic killing, is once again fooling authorities and looking after the mentally ill," The Dominion Post said.

"She resigned the next day and has since disappeared."

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 - Stuff